THE great Irish poet of our day was born in Dublin, June 13, 1865. He is the son of Mr. John B. Yeats, himself an artist, and a true poet in feeling, though he has not made literature his profession. W. B. Yeats was educated at Godolphin School, Hammersmith, and at the Dublin High School. He began his career as an art student, but gave up art for literature when he had reached the age of twenty-one. The last decade of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century witnessed a great national awakening in Ireland, and the birth of ideas and ideals which have had a profound effect upon Irish politics, literature, and national life. In all of the organizations that have most largely contributed toward this change, W. B. Yeats has been among the foremost, and the chief standard-bearer of the intellectual and literary revival is this distinguished poet, dramatist, and orator. While his chief reputation rests on his poetry, essays, and dramas, no one has a deeper knowledge of the influences and energies, spiritual, intellectual, artistic, social, and economic, at work in Ireland to-day. Thousands who heard him in this country in 1903 know him to be a most gifted orator, and not a mere reader of essays or of selections from his works, and his oratory is not the least interesting phase of his versatile genius. In his view, verse should neither be sung nor said; it should be intoned, as it were, to a simple notation, whereby every word is pronounced so as to reach the ear like a conversational utterance, but also to reach a certain tone, like a definite note in a song. This, he maintains, is the original art of the minstrels and the troubadours, the original art in which all love, religion, and history were once embraced. He was one of the chief organizers and the head of the Irish Literary Theater, established some years ago, which undertook to do for Irish drama what Antoine, with the Théâtre Libre, did for the French drama; and he is President of its successor organization, the Irish National Theater Society, the story of which is told elsewhere in IRISH LITERATURE.' Of the quality of his writing, Mr. George W. Russell ("A. E.") writes thus : 66 When I was asked to write about our Irish poet my thoughts were like rambling flocks that have no shepherd, and without guidance my rambling thoughts have run anywhere. I have known the poet, and his poetry too, intimately for many years, and I find myself like the artist who is too close to his subject to view it as a whole. I confess I have feared to enter or linger too long in the many-colored land of Druid twilights and tunes. A beauty not our own, more perfect than we can ourselves conceive, is a danger to the imagination. I am too often tempted to wander with Usheen in Tirnanoge and to forget my own heart and its more rarely accorded vision of truth. |